Wow - I've been away from the forum way too long. I was in Alaska on my birthday, and didn't see all the birthday wishes at the time. Thanks so much! And I'm so sorry I haven't replied sooner!

The Alaska trip was great. My wife and I considered going there for a honeymoon, 24 years ago, but other things came up. Now we finally got there. Besides the hiking and sightseeing, I shot a lot of waters, and some good fish specimen shots, especially of grayling.

A quick fish story: One day I caught my first ever arctic grayling, probably all of 9 or 10 inches, on a size 8 Woolly Bugger. There was very little water in that river slow enough for a trout or grayling to hang out. The next day we fished a small stream with riffles and little plunge pools, and the grayling were all over. We caught half a dozen from the first little pool we fished, up to 13 inches or so. The next day we fished a stream known for potential for trophy grayling of 18 to 20 inches. There I found the grayling were actually picky, not like the eat-anything-buggy-looking behavior I'd been told to expect. I drifted flies over rising fish over and over and got rejected. There were midges on the water, so I tried an 18 or 20 Griffith's Gnat. No dice. My wife said she thought they wanted smaller still. There were some really tiny pale yellow midges on the water, so I went to a #24 midge pattern, clipped off about half the hackle to make it smaller still, and tried that. Bingo. I caught a gorgeous 18 or 19 inch grayling on that tiny fly, and the fish posed nicely for pictures. It will definitely be a "net shot" that will appear in the game at some point.